Rutter initially had plans to create a modern art collection at the Leeds City Art Gallery, but had been frustrated in this aim by "boorish" local councillors.[2] He co-founded the Leeds Art Collections Fund with Sadler, to help acquisitions and shows, among one in June 1913 of Post-Impressionism held at the Arts Club, which was reactivated by the new activity. The discussions there about contemporary art, and the presence of Rutter, had a significant influence on the thinking of Herbert Read (1893–1968), who turned 20 in December 1913.[3]

Using his personal links with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich, Sadler built up a remarkable collection of expressionist and abstract expressionist art at a time when such art was either unknown or dismissed in London, even by well-known promoters of modernism such as Roger Fry. Most notable in his collection was Kandinsky's abstract painting Fragment for Composition VII, of 1912,[4] which was in Leeds and on display at the Leeds Arts Club in 1913. He also owned Paul Gauguin's celebrated work "The Vision After the Sermon". According to Patrick Heron, Kandinsky even visited the Arts Club in Leeds before the First World War.[5]

THE LEEDS ART CLUB A highly influential forum for the avant-garde in politics, philosophy, art and literature met here from 1908. Ground-breaking exhibitions included the 1913 Post-Impressionist show and Cubist and Futurist Art in 1914. Famous speakers included G.B. Shaw and W.B. Yeats. 1903-1923[6][7]

In many respects the Leeds Arts Club can be seen as the closest England came to a genuine expressionist art movement, and this was accentuated not only by its interests, which mirror those seen in German expressionist art groups of the time, but in the Club's direct links to Kandinsky in Germany. It also produced its own expressionist artists, including Jacob Kramer and the little-known, but remarkable, painter Bruce Turner.

It also was the seed ground from which the eminent art critic and theorist Herbert Read emerged, and Henry Moore has been linked to it. If one takes Orage and Jackson's New Age as England's equivalent to the German expressionist journal Der Sturm, then it seems reasonable to view the Leeds Arts Club as the centre of English Expressionism.[8]